Zen of Recovery

The Zen of Recovery was the first book to offer a viable Eastern wisdom based recovery alternative to the patriarchal and God-based methods of many 12-step programs. Many thousands have found its methods and message to be successful in their own steps to recovery. The Zen of Recovery is used by many 12-step study groups as a weekly guide and manual and has become a classic in its field. The Zen of Recovery recently entered the digital age with its release as a Kindle electronic book and Audible audiobook.

Watch for regular articles on the Zen of Recovery!
We're starting off by offering you a sample chapter — What Is ZEN?

What is ZEN?

Who are we really? What is really the meaning of Life? How can we attain lasting happiness in the face of our seemingly endless troubles? These questions are basic to our lives, and it is from these questions that the practice of Zen has its birth.

Zen can be the compassionate scalpel that removes the layers of accrued opinions, beliefs, and frozen expectations that stand between us and true experience. Zen shows us that what we mistakenly call ourselves, our personal identity, is really no more than a mask over our true selves and natures. Beliefs, opinions, prejudices, educational and cultural training, our family backgrounds: All these are merely accidental factors, if you will. They are necessary tools for survival and integration into the larger society, but they are not really who you are.

Without falling back on convenient definitions of job, religion, sex and so on, who and what are we? If you lose your job, will you lose yourself? If you convert to another religion, do you substantially change? It may seem so if you are overly attached to these limiting definitions. Read the entire chapter . . .

If you are here to read this,
think of those who aren't.
Pray for them: good thoughts for those
who lost their minds, love and years
to compulsion, addiction and fears.
Think of their great sacrifice.Read more . . .

To gain to full benefit of the Blessing, visualize someone you believe holy standing in front of you, saying the Blessing aloud, touching each part of your body, from head to feet as they bless those parts. Touch them yourself as you read.
Read more . . .

"People are changing. They’re becoming less human. It's happening all around us."

I'll bet you've thought nearly the same thing sometimes. In fact, I know you have.

These chilling and prophetic words from Dr. Kibner, a psychiatrist played by Leonard Nimoy in the 1981 re-make of "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" seem to have leapt from the realm of science fiction to become the epitaph of our age. Read more . . .

The last couple of years have brought losses once unimaginable to those of us who grew up in the fifties and sixties, and indeed to anyone who has bee influenced at all by the counterculture fathered by the men who recently died. Part of ourselves died as well when we heard the news.

The recent deaths of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in 1997 and the more publicized death of Timothy Leary the year before has not only robbed us of role models and teachers we hoped would be around forever (and it seemed as though they had been around forever!) but also put many of us face to face with the fact of our own inexorable aging and approaching deaths, as well as the aging, successes, and failures of the counterculture, once thought of as only the province of the young. Read more . . .